James Kitching
| James Kitching | |
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James Kitching in 1947
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| Born | 6 February 1922 |
| Died | 24 December 2003 (aged 81) |
| Nationality | South Africa |
| Fields | vertebrate palaeontologist |
| Institutions | University of the Witwatersrand |
| Alma mater | University of the Witwatersrand |
James William Kitching (6 February 1922 – 24 December 2003) was a South African vertebrate palaeontologist and regarded as one of the world’s greatest fossil finders.
His work in the southern hemisphere, including Antarctica, led to the establishment of one of the world's finest fossil collections, housed at the Bernard Price Institute for Palaeontological Research (BPI) in Johannesburg. He contributed greatly to the Karoo palaeontology of southern Africa, and Gondwana, and was an authority on the stratigraphic and distributional relationships of Permo-Triassic reptiles from South Africa. He published more than fifty papers and books on various facets of palaeontology. His contribution to Karoo palaeontology of southern Africa and Gondwana, earned him international recognition.
Kitching also studied mammals. In this regard he excavated and researched fossils from several cave sites, the most notable being the Cave of Hearths and the limeworks at Makapansgat where he discovered the type specimen of what Professor Raymond Dart described as a new species of the "ape man" Australopithecus, A. prometheus in 1947. This is now considered a synonym of the type species, A. africanus, which Dart described in 1925. Together with Professor Raymond Dart, he undertook pioneering taphonomic research on the bone accumulations at Makapansgat. These projects entailed spending time in the Netherlands, Belgium and France to study Palaeolithic mammalian faunas; he was also involved in the analysis of fossils from Pinhole Cave in England.
Despite not having had a standard undergraduate academic background, he was permitted by the Senate of the University of the Witwatersrand to register for a Master of Science degree. For his research on Karoo fossils, completed in 1972, he was awarded a doctorate. Having refined the biostratigraphy of the rocks of the Beaufort Group in South Africa, he started a major collecting project in the Triassic and Jurassic rocks of the Elliot and Clarens Formations in South Africa, and published the first biostratigraphic scheme for these lithological units as well.
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